The future of blogging 2015

Gambling my life savings on the future of digital

In the year 2000 I took my life savings to a tiny camera shop under the arches at London Bridge station and bought the first digital SLR that Canon produced – the D30.

I was a lawyer at the time, and had to run out at lunchtime on the day when they called me to say it had arrived. We didn’t take lunch breaks in those days, but I had been waiting for this (the first digital camera with interchangeable lenses) for over a year, so I would rather have been sacked than go another day without it.

I still remember taking that camera back onto the trading floor in the bank where I worked. These guys always wanted to be the first to have the next bit of kit, and they thought that this camera was the coolest thing ever. I was therefore the coolest lawyer in the City because the cool camera was mine. They weren’t photographers. They just recognised that a major breakthrough in the status quo had happened and they all wanted to have a go. It didn’t matter that it took half an hour to upload a file, or the JPEGs were tiny. This was a tipping point.

But if you had canvassed opinion amongst photographers on that same day you would have learnt that digital SLRs were the work of the devil. Real photographers shoot film – always have, always will. Digital files will never have the same quality as film. Shooting digital is cheating.

In fact it would take photographers another 10 years to finally accept that it’s not the camera that makes you a photographer, and that shooting digital won’t cause the apocalypse.

I see something similar going on with blogging at the moment.

What’s happened to the trailblazing bloggers?

Whilst old school photographers had over 100 years of history to back up their case for film, bloggers who have been blogging for a while still only have a little over 15 years of best practise to fall back on. (And for my blogging credentials, I was there in 1989 with my first travel blog, hand coded in html, documenting a 3 week trip round New Zealand.) Bloggers have always been trailblazers, breaking new ground, out there at the forefront of online innovation – why do I get the sense there is a nervousness to embrace the next big change?

The mobile tipping point

That change is the move to mobile. 2015 has seen the tipping point where more web content is consumed on mobile than on desktop. The immediate effect for bloggers isn’t that drastic. Posts are written and published. Life goes on. But some unintended consequences are emerging, which are causing a bit resistance in some corners of the blogging community.

This post is to reassure fledgling bloggers that you don’t have to blog the way it’s always been done. And it’s for veteran bloggers who are torn between supporting the past and giving their blog a new lease of life. And for go-with-the-flow bloggers who don’t really know why they do things any particular way. You can embrace the future and your blog will fly.

The unintended consequences for bloggers of the mobile revolution

1. Comments are down. People reading blogs on phones don’t want to have to log in, fiddle about with tiny boxes and laboriously type out a long comment, enter their email address and URL, deal with a captcha and take 10 minutes out of their day. They want to connect on Twitter or Facebook, where they don’t have to log in. Are you fighting a losing battle with comments, or are you engaging with your readers where they want to talk to you? Or are you still seeing lots of comments? I’d love to hear from you – send me a tweet:

Hey @EmmaDaviesPhoto…
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2. Google hates you if you aren’t mobile friendly. Your visitors don’t want to have to pinch and scroll to read your blog post. As of 21 April 2015, Google is on the side of the blog reader and penalises blogs that aren’t truly responsive. Just like the old school camera guys, bloggers who don’t embrace this change will be left behind. If you don’t want new readers to find you through Google, this change won’t affect you.

3. Sidebars are a waste of space. Sidebars on mobile show up right at the bottom of your post, after the comments (if you still have them), the related posts widget, the share buttons, everything. It’s a committed reader who will scroll right to the end to check out everything in your sidebar. (Which includes all your advertising, if you have it, and if that’s where you put it.) I think sidebars will stick around for as long as anyone still uses desktop, but I suspect advertisers will see a huge drop off in click through rates.

4. Content is changing. The old advice was the more often you posted, the better your blog would do. I think that’s still true, but the difference now is that you don’t have to post all your content on your blog. You can use Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest and wherever else you choose to be social. You’ll reach more readers and keep your existing readers engaged with your micro updates, and it’s easier to do daily updates this way. And I think you can stand out as a blogger by posting (on your own blog) longer, better researched, genuinely helpful/interesting/entertaining posts less frequently. Am I wrong? What’s your experience?

Hi @EmmaDaviesPhoto, I think you are entirely wrong about changing blog content.
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I think you might have a point about changing blog content @EmmaDaviesPhoto.
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5. Will blogs turn into apps? This one’s a bit left-field. It’s becoming as easy to publish an app as it is to start a WordPress blog, so will blogs move over to being hosted via an app? It’s so much easier to open up an app than to find your web browser, type in the URL and wait for it to fire up. To enable truly frictionless content consumption I wouldn’t be surprised if bloggers make the leap in the next couple of years and start using apps, even if just to post content hosted on their own URL. I’m trying it out. (But I do have a history of recklessly adopting new technology the moment it seems even partly viable.)

That @EmmaDaviesPhoto is a crazy lady. Blogs are blogs, not apps.
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I want a blog app! @EmmaDaviesPhoto
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Visual social media

I think strong images are so crucial to the success of any blogger that I offer an entire year’s worth of free photography lessons, via email. You can sign up here: